Re: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

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Theodore Lief Gannon

7 Apr 2017 7 Apr '17

12:26 a.m.

I'm also -1 to an explicit code of conduct. Sure, once in a while someone has to step in with Wheaton's Law or what I can't resist calling Simon Says; but all it takes is a gentle reminder. Nobody here is genuinely contemptuous toward anyone else. The barrier of entry is too high -- the trolls are happy enough on reddit. ;) On Apr 6, 2017 6:17 AM, "Andreas Abel" wrote: On 03.04.2017 10:42, Henning Thielemann wrote:

...

On Mon, 3 Apr 2017, Simon Peyton Jones via Libraries wrote:

I’ve been talking to a couple of people about whether it would be

...
useful to have an explicit Haskell Community Code of Conduct. Many online communities have one (e.g. Rust), and it might be helpful for everyone to have a concrete baseline rather than an unwritten standard. Any views on that?

I think these Code of Conducts make things even worse because then some people start to check every word against these codes. Instead I suggest we make more use of humor. E.g. Carter Schonwald's comment about grumpy people made me think about renaming my prelude-compat package to grumpy-prelude. :-)

I agree with Henning. The discussion gets heated because people are passionate about Haskell; and the latter is a good thing. I rather stomach some insults on a mailing list than having a formal code of conduct. Severe violations of politeness can be pointed out without having such a formal code. We can apply common sense. -- Andreas Abel <>< Du bist der geliebte Mensch. Department of Computer Science and Engineering Chalmers and Gothenburg University, Sweden andreas.abel@gu.se http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~abela/ _______________________________________________ Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries

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Ben Franksen

8 Apr 8 Apr

6:53 p.m.

New subject: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

Same here, couldn't say it better. Am 07.04.2017 um 06:26 schrieb Theodore Lief Gannon:

...

I'm also -1 to an explicit code of conduct. Sure, once in a while someone has to step in with Wheaton's Law or what I can't resist calling Simon Says; but all it takes is a gentle reminder. Nobody here is genuinely contemptuous toward anyone else. The barrier of entry is too high -- the trolls are happy enough on reddit. ;)

On Apr 6, 2017 6:17 AM, "Andreas Abel" wrote:

On 03.04.2017 10:42, Henning Thielemann wrote:

...
On Mon, 3 Apr 2017, Simon Peyton Jones via Libraries wrote:

I’ve been talking to a couple of people about whether it would be

...
useful to have an explicit Haskell Community Code of Conduct. Many online communities have one (e.g. Rust), and it might be helpful for everyone to have a concrete baseline rather than an unwritten standard. Any views on that?

I think these Code of Conducts make things even worse because then some people start to check every word against these codes. Instead I suggest we make more use of humor. E.g. Carter Schonwald's comment about grumpy people made me think about renaming my prelude-compat package to grumpy-prelude. :-)

I agree with Henning. The discussion gets heated because people are passionate about Haskell; and the latter is a good thing.

I rather stomach some insults on a mailing list than having a formal code of conduct. Severe violations of politeness can be pointed out without having such a formal code. We can apply common sense.

_______________________________________________ Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries

wren romano

24 Apr 24 Apr

9:39 p.m.

New subject: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

I'm +1 to having a CoC. It doesn't have to be complicated, and indeed CoCs are better when they're uncomplicated (but explicit! vague CoCs help noone). The point of a CoC is not to change people's behavior (if you want that, there are more effective approaches). The point is to serve as a touchstone for community values. Without a touchstone, communities drift over time as people age and come and go. Drifting itself is unavoidable and not necessarily bad, but sometimes that drifting is the slipping that becomes corrosive. Touchstones give communities a way to correct for corrosion: by concretely recording the past they make the past visible, and thus make the present visible as something that has changed from the past. CoCs also, as Tom says, make the community values explicit for outsiders to see. This is especially important for women and minorities, because we are disproportionately affected by breaches of civility. This is why numerous organizations for women in STEM advocate for having CoCs. To pick a few examples: https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/ https://geekfeminism.org/2014/06/30/ The mere existence of a CoC indicates that at least at some point the community cared enough about civility to try to ensure it. That alone indicates that the community has higher standards for civility than the vast bulk of online communities for programming. And it is something we look for. If you want to avoid discouraging women and minorities from joining, it's not enough to play Simon Says, you have to write the rules down too. -- Live well, ~wren

lennart spitzner

28 Apr 28 Apr

5:49 a.m.

New subject: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

A couple weeks earlier there was a discussion on tuple instances on this list that got somewhat out of hand, leading to a meta-discussion on civility. There was the suggestion to create and endorse a CoC for this community. Now both topics have not received much further contribution, an indication that not much more can be gained from these discussions. Yet I have a bad feeling about leaving them in such a manner, because: There is no real conclusion, there is no agreement, and I do not see much advancement of how we, as a community, cope with negative situations. And while I can understand that there is little incentive/motivation to continue due to negative emotions involved, I also fear that ending discussions on such negative emotions will discourage contributions in general not only now, but in the future as well. So I will dare to continue, ask a couple of questions, and make some suggestions: 1. At which point of the particular tuple instance discussion would it have helped to have some CoC, and in what way? Is the hope that the participants had considered this CoC and not said something in the way that they did? Or would it have allowed us to quickly point out the CoC at some specific point in response to some mail? Or something else? I _can_ see a couple of instances where a CoC could have been pointed out, but these don't convince me, because a) in those cases giving clear, respectful negative feedback (for example regarding "joking") (would/should) have worked just as well if not better and b) because simply pointing out the CoC during a discussion is rather non-constructive because it is a vague form of criticism and the receiving party will most likely consider it inappropriate, and so it has the opposite effect. 2. on a related note, I have a hard time pinpointing the moment in the discussion where things transitioned from cool to flaming. I'd perhaps name as important factors the useless rhetoric (go and ask those mathematicians) and the case of hiding behind "it was a dumb joke" followed by what in my eyes reads like a dishonest apology. But I am not certain and perhaps unfair. My subjective estimation is that discussing this a bit further is more constructive than working on a CoC. What parts of the discussion were unfortunate, exactly, and why? The general opinion here seems to be to ask for civility without naming names. I disagree: I have little hope that giving the vague feedback to all participants that some parts of the discussion were non-constructive/disrespectful will improve things in the future. As an example, we might take the following advice from this: "Humour is important and generally welcome, but it is necessary to be especially careful to make it clear when exactly we talk in jest, and to not let slip phrases that can easily interpreted as offensive if not interpreted as a joke. We will not accept retroactively hiding behind 'it was a joke'." (perhaps some people think such a statement belonged in a CoC, but then this is a different/more specific kind of advice than what I can see in existing/proposed CoCs.) 3. And back to first discussion: I refuse to vote -1 or +1, because the topic is more nuanced than that. Instead, I vote for the following: "Additional tuple instances shall be added after such a point in time where either the methods have been renamed as to avoid confusion, or after the generic versions are no longer exposed in the default Prelude. (and whether this point will come is intentionally left open.)" 4. And reflecting on the previous point, I encourage all participants to try to not make pure -1/+1 votes, but to include conditions under which they may switch, especially for controversial subjects. I have hopes that this will help finding a majority-backed compromise. 5. It would help to have the discussion and the arguments made by both sides archived somewhere other than on the mailing list. In one of the last mails I wrote to this list I implicitly complained about the signal-to-noise, and to be clear, I don't mean that any messages consist of noise. But it can easily take a couple of mails back-and-forth to get some point across, and these threads can grow to over a hundred mails quickly. I realize that the main issue here of course is the amount of work it would mean to somewhat objectively summarize an (often heated) debate. But then the alternative is the reiteration of the same topics in an almost predicable frequency. Thoughts? (Sorry, Tony, for somewhat singling out the "joking" as the negative example. This might be unfair. You have a valid point, but conveyed it rather poorly especially to the end of the discussion.) -- lennart

Tony Morris

30 Apr 30 Apr

9 a.m.

New subject: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

On 28/04/17 19:49, lennart spitzner wrote:

...

the case of hiding behind "it was a dumb joke" followed by what in my eyes reads like a dishonest apology. But I am not certain and perhaps unfair.

We will not accept retroactively hiding behind 'it was a joke'."

(Sorry, Tony,

Thank you for your incredibly genuine apology. Please leave me out of this discussion.

Tom Murphy

11:49 a.m.

New subject: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

To address your point about: "My subjective estimation is that discussing this a bit further is more constructive than working on a CoC. What parts of the discussion were unfortunate, exactly, and why?" The problem with just discussing it further here is that: a) Nothing specific needs to get explicitly agreed upon, so we can all leave with our own interpretations and conclusions of what was decided b) We're 20-something emails into an email chain. All of us discussing will have developed more nuanced views, but for example a new person coming to the community will have no idea about what was discussed here. A CoC, on the other hand, is a big neon sign at the front door of the community, summarizing the basic bullet points of what we can agree we want our community to be. (By the way, I agreed with much of what you talked about but I think your points could have been made without calling anyone else out by name. Just my 2c.) Tom On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 5:49 AM, lennart spitzner < lsp@informatik.uni-kiel.de> wrote:

...

A couple weeks earlier there was a discussion on tuple instances on this list that got somewhat out of hand, leading to a meta-discussion on civility. There was the suggestion to create and endorse a CoC for this community.

Now both topics have not received much further contribution, an indication that not much more can be gained from these discussions. Yet I have a bad feeling about leaving them in such a manner, because: There is no real conclusion, there is no agreement, and I do not see much advancement of how we, as a community, cope with negative situations. And while I can understand that there is little incentive/motivation to continue due to negative emotions involved, I also fear that ending discussions on such negative emotions will discourage contributions in general not only now, but in the future as well.

So I will dare to continue, ask a couple of questions, and make some suggestions:

1. At which point of the particular tuple instance discussion would it have helped to have some CoC, and in what way? Is the hope that the participants had considered this CoC and not said something in the way that they did? Or would it have allowed us to quickly point out the CoC at some specific point in response to some mail? Or something else?

I _can_ see a couple of instances where a CoC could have been pointed out, but these don't convince me, because a) in those cases giving clear, respectful negative feedback (for example regarding "joking") (would/should) have worked just as well if not better and b) because simply pointing out the CoC during a discussion is rather non-constructive because it is a vague form of criticism and the receiving party will most likely consider it inappropriate, and so it has the opposite effect.

2. on a related note, I have a hard time pinpointing the moment in the discussion where things transitioned from cool to flaming. I'd perhaps name as important factors the useless rhetoric (go and ask those mathematicians) and the case of hiding behind "it was a dumb joke" followed by what in my eyes reads like a dishonest apology. But I am not certain and perhaps unfair.

My subjective estimation is that discussing this a bit further is more constructive than working on a CoC. What parts of the discussion were unfortunate, exactly, and why? The general opinion here seems to be to ask for civility without naming names. I disagree: I have little hope that giving the vague feedback to all participants that some parts of the discussion were non-constructive/disrespectful will improve things in the future.

As an example, we might take the following advice from this: "Humour is important and generally welcome, but it is necessary to be especially careful to make it clear when exactly we talk in jest, and to not let slip phrases that can easily interpreted as offensive if not interpreted as a joke. We will not accept retroactively hiding behind 'it was a joke'."

(perhaps some people think such a statement belonged in a CoC, but then this is a different/more specific kind of advice than what I can see in existing/proposed CoCs.)

3. And back to first discussion: I refuse to vote -1 or +1, because the topic is more nuanced than that. Instead, I vote for the following: "Additional tuple instances shall be added after such a point in time where either the methods have been renamed as to avoid confusion, or after the generic versions are no longer exposed in the default Prelude. (and whether this point will come is intentionally left open.)"

4. And reflecting on the previous point, I encourage all participants to try to not make pure -1/+1 votes, but to include conditions under which they may switch, especially for controversial subjects. I have hopes that this will help finding a majority-backed compromise.

5. It would help to have the discussion and the arguments made by both sides archived somewhere other than on the mailing list. In one of the last mails I wrote to this list I implicitly complained about the signal-to-noise, and to be clear, I don't mean that any messages consist of noise. But it can easily take a couple of mails back-and-forth to get some point across, and these threads can grow to over a hundred mails quickly. I realize that the main issue here of course is the amount of work it would mean to somewhat objectively summarize an (often heated) debate. But then the alternative is the reiteration of the same topics in an almost predicable frequency. Thoughts?

(Sorry, Tony, for somewhat singling out the "joking" as the negative example. This might be unfair. You have a valid point, but conveyed it rather poorly especially to the end of the discussion.)

-- lennart

Theodore Lief Gannon

6:55 p.m.

New subject: Civility notes (was "Traversable instances for (,,) a b")

On Apr 30, 2017 8:52 AM, "Tom Murphy" wrote: We're 20-something emails into an email chain. All of us discussing will have developed more nuanced views, but for example a new person coming to the community will have no idea about what was discussed here. A CoC, on the other hand, is a big neon sign at the front door of the community, summarizing the basic bullet points of what we can agree we want our community to be. ...okay, that point has tipped me to +1 on at least putting together a set of guidelines. Quote Simon, invoke Wheaton's Law, etc. I'm still -1 on any sort of "code" designed to enable enforcement, but a sign on the door saying "here's what we've learned" sounds like a pretty good idea.

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Ben Franksen
lennart spitzner
Theodore Lief Gannon
Tom Murphy
Tony Morris
wren romano